Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus that displays a button for accessing a server, a method of controlling the same, and a storage medium, and more particularly to an access control technique for controlling access to a cloud service using a Web browser on an image forming apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
There has been developed a business that provides services, as cloud services, by making the services open to the public on the Internet. A print server as well has come to be demanded to provide its function as a print service on the Internet. By providing the print service as a cloud service, it becomes unnecessary to arrange print servers in a large-scale data center and perform hardware management on a customer-by-customer basis. Further, the cloud service has various advantageous points, including facilitation of addition of resources depending on load on the server. For this reason, a print system has come to be provided that performs pull printing in which a printer acquires print data from a print server via the Internet and performs printing.
Access to a print server operated on an intranet has been limited within the intranet, and hence it is very difficult to illegally access the print server. However, in a case where a print server is open to the public as a cloud service on the Internet, the print server can be accessed from anywhere in the world, and hence security is critically important. In recent years in which security has become increasingly important, a standard protocol called OAuth for realizing cooperation of authorization is formulated and started to be applied to exchange of data between the cloud service and a client of the service (see “The OAuth 1.0 Protocol”, [online] E. Hammer-Lahav, April 2010 <URL http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5849>, “The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework draft-ietf-oauth-v2-31”, [online] D. Hardt., Jul. 31, 2012 <URL http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-31>). In the OAuth protocol, as information for verifying authority delegated from a user or a client, information called a token is used. The cloud service can prevent unauthorized accesses by verifying the validity of the token sent from the client.
Now, let us consider a case where a multifunction peripheral (hereinafter referred to as the “image forming apparatus”) as a multifunction machine that integrates the functions of a printer, a copy machine, a facsimile machine, and so forth, is an OAuth client, and cooperates with a cloud service. In this case, a user delegates authority of access to resources of the cloud service to the image forming apparatus, whereby the image forming apparatus becomes capable of cooperating with the cloud service. When the image forming apparatus actually performs print processing in cooperation with a server which provides the cloud service, it is envisaged that the image forming apparatus makes use of Web access by a Web browser installed therein.
However, to access the server using the Web browser of the image forming apparatus, the user is required to directly input a URL of the server. This brings about a problem that in case the user inputs an incorrect URL by mistake, the access is rejected as an error.